Saturday, January 26, 2013

how many Little Women?

In your work in the field of Japanese cartoons you may
occasionally uncover examples of any one of the several versions of anime based
on Little Women, the seminal American novel by Louisa May Alcott.But wait, you ask. How can you tell all these iterations of Little Women apart?Well,
we here at LET’S ANIME have compiled a handy guide to allow you to instantly
identify and categorize Little Women by year, studio, English dub version, and
hairstyle.

Yes, not only are there three separate ‘Little Women’ anime,
but all three were dubbed and released in the United States to a perhaps
confused but mostly indifferent audience. What’s more, these three releases all
give us the same basic snippet of Little Women storyline, frustrating the needs
of those required to write a book report on Little Women but can’t be bothered
to read the book.

Who are the titular Little Women, and why? Responsible
eldest Meg, tomboy writer Jo, demure piano diva Beth, and girly-girl Amy
survive as best they can in 1860s New England,enduring financial difficulties, repercussions of the Civil War and a
challenging adolescence as they become what we know today as “teenagers” but
that the Victorian period had no name for.

The ink was barely dry on Alcott’s original Little Women
when the first of several Japanese translations appeared in 1906. When Japanese animation titan Toei decided to
produce a series of TV specials based on Western literature in the late 70s,
Little Women got the nod along with Les Miserables, Frankenstein, Call Of The
Wild, the literary fantasia Arsene Lupin Vs Sherlock Holmes, and a Dracula that
adapted Marvel’s comic book rather than Bram Stoker’s novel.

Yes, that's $29.95 for an hour long VHS tape your kids will watch once, and no, I don't miss the 80s

Toei’s Little Women, a 67-minute special on the Fuji TV
network, aired May 3 1980. It
starts right where the book does, a Christmas for the March girls that promises
few presents and no Father. Dubbed by our Robotech pals at Intersound, this
Little Women was packaged by Harmony Gold and found its way to American video
stores thanks to Vestron Video’s Children’s Video Library, who also brought you
Rainbow Brite, the Hugga Bunch, and the Glo Friends. This Little Women wraps up with Jo cutting her
hair to get money to buy a watch fob for a guy who buys her a comb. Well, not
that last part.

Hot on the heels of the Toei telemovie was Movie International’s 1981 version, which is titled Little Women: Four Sisters Of
Young Grass. I’m sure there’s a good reason they wanted to invoke lawn imagery
in the title, but so far the logic escapes me. MIC farmed the animation out to
Toei and there’s a distinct similarity in the two productions, especially in
the character designs which sometimes show a family likeness.Jo is almost completely different, however; sporting
a new hairstyle and an adult look at odds with the story’s intent.MIC’s series ran from April until September
of ’81. With episode titles like “Christmas Eve At The March Home”, “Angels In
Boots”, “Jo’s Boyfriend”,“Beth’s
Makeover”, “Jo Vs Amy”, “Meg is Caught In A Trap”, “Trouble In Raleigh”, and
“Don’t Die, Beth”, you can see which story arcs the series focused on.

Along with MIC’s Honey Honey and the Mushi Pro Tezuka series
Jungle Emperor Go Leo, Little Women was dubbed by SONIC International, a
since-vanished Florida production
house. Like Honey Honey, Little Women made it onto a series of Sony home video
tapes that may very well be lurking in the thrift stores and used bookshops
near you. If MIC’s Little Women ever made
it onto CBN Cable along with Honey Honey and
Leo, it got past us because we didn’t catch it.

It would be six long, Jo-free years before Little Women
would again be animated in Japan.
Nippon Animation took a ground-up approach to their 1987 World Masterpiece Theater series Little Women In Love, throwing out the Toei character designs
and retooling courtesy Yoshifumi Kondo, who directed the lovely Whispers Of The
Heart and would character design for Only Yesterday, Grave Of The Fireflies,
and Princess Mononoke before his untimely death in 1998.Nippon’s series is the
most successful of the bunch, featuring period-accurate hairstyles, clothing, and
architecture combined with good animation and scripts that stick close to
Alcott’s original. The series ran 48 episodes and garnered a sequel, Little
Women II: The Wrath Of Aunt March. I mean, Jo’s Boys. Japanese audiences also got the entire series
in English on specialty Japanese cable channels. Americans, however, got one
measly VHS release of this series, which again features that first episode
where the March gals are facing a poor Christmas. Saban provided the English
dub.

It's a Little Women Christmas with what appear to be Satan's Zombie Dolls

But is this all there is to the story of Little Women in
Japanese animation?No sir. The TBS
series “World Mukashibanashi Manga” (Manga Folktales Of The World)devoted an episode to Little Women in October of 1977.

Manga Folktales featured a variety of stories and fairy tales obscure
and famous – Jack & The Beanstalk, Alibaba & The 40 Thieves, Beauty And
The Beast, Why The Sea Is Salty, Gifts Of The North Wind, Cinderella, Wizard Of
Oz – and in English (and Spanish) they show up in the cheap DVD
bins from time to time. Did their Little Women get an English version? Is there
yet another dub of yet another anime Little Women out there? How much Little
Women is too much Little Women?

10 comments:

The "Manga Folktales" series was a childhood fav of mine nobody would ever care to remember at all. Those episodes were interesting for the different approaches in style given to each.

While I suppose Nippon Animation's "Little Women" didn't get much airplay love back then, I think it's currently up on TBN's "Smile of a Child" schedule at present. If you get a TBN station terrestrially that has Smile of a Child as a subchannel, or simply access to it via the internet in all sorts of places, then you can watch it for yourself!http://www.smileofachildtv.org/alphabetic_programs.php?t=r&r=K-L#program_nav

Wow. Congrats and your knowledge on the last one. there are so many VHS releases of that series in thrift stores and stuff everywhere and people don't even realize it anime and yes it is quite interesting how each one has a different style totally worth watching just for that. I have a quite large collection of rare obscure VHS anime releases and I have photos all them on my facebook group" Rare Animated VHS collectors"

We all hope and pray trunkschan90. I wish there was more an interest into these literary-based anime classics myself but I guess they don't pay the bills in the end (thinking of the one time we had Nobody's Boy Remi for a short time).

The Nippon Animation series was also shown on HBO around 1989 or so. I remember watching it weekday mornings before school. IIRC the timeslot alternated between Little Women (or literally, "Tales of Little Women" - which is close to a literal translation of the show's Japanese title) and Nippon Animation's WMT Tom Sawyer. It's very calm, soft and leisurely paced, which may have been the reason why it didn't find much of an audience Stateside. By the way, the first 20 or so episodes are original stories by the series writer Akira Miyazaki, but once they get to the Christmas storyline about episode 22-23 or so, the rest of the series follows the book pretty closely. There are a couple rather pointless name changes to annoy the purists. Overall it's a good show for kids though. In addition to watching the dub version on Smile of a Child, there are a couple of web sites where you can watch the entire show in raw Japanese for free.